Money and Power

There's a fascinating article in last week's New Yorker (read it on line here) which, while it's about a foundation funding medical research, raises some pretty fundamental and more widely applicable questions about the amount of control that funders have the right to exercise over what their grantees do. The foundation director at the centre of the work described says, unapologetically, "Money gives you power to drive people's behavior". That's certainly true; what's in contention is how, to what degree, and even whether it's right, or effective, to use that power. Especially relevant, I feel, to foundations which have stopped making grants and started to employ people to do the work instead - the ultimate form of 'behaviour control'. (For a New Yorker piece, it's quite short - and non-medical types like me can gloss over some of the detail.)